Joel Jenkins
This is what truth-telling looks like
Listening to the conga-line of the obsequious pontificating on how “disrespectful” Lidia Thorpe was to our foreign King this week is as hilarious as it is nauseating. People of all political persuasions found any number of reasons to condemn Senator Thorpe, arguing because she had successfully used her platform as an MP to gain global attention for the causes for which she is a passionate advocate, she should resign as an MP.
We first had to sit through another round of “Stolen Senate Seat” hypocrisy. Yes – *sigh* – Thorpe was elected on the Greens’ ticket and one sympathises with the Greens at the loss of a rightful number and with it the balance of power but it’s not the Greens who are preoccupied by Thorpe’s “stolen” seat and she is playing by the same rules as everyone else. No-one on Sky News seems quite as exercised at Tammy Tyrell and David Van and Gerard Rennick and even Fatima Payman occupying “stolen” seats in this Senate, nor was there the same level of lasting resentment at the past defections of Jacqui Lambie, Rex Patrick, Tim Storer, Lucy Gichuhi, Glenn Lazarus, Brian Burston, Rod Culleton, Fraser Anning or Cory Bernardi. Both major parties have ardently courted fleeing rats from their rivals’ ranks – notably the Howard Government’s elevation of Queensland’s quisling Quasimodo Mal Colston to the Deputy Presidency back in 1996. Only Cheryl Kernot ever did the ‘honourable’ thing and resigned from the Senate following her shock defection to Labor in 1997 so Michael Kroger and his ilk can spare us their spittle-flecked outrage.
The main game was the sanctimonious demands for “consequences” for Thorpe’s “disrespectful” behaviour towards the King, our invited guest/Ruler. Despite elevating the dodging of accountability to a fine art, the Coalition was inevitably first to demand retribution. Linda Reynolds – best known for trying to bankrupt her rape-surviving ex-staffer by retraumatising her with indulgent punitive lawfare – opined unironically about the “great responsibility” elected representatives had to “maintain the dignity and respect of the Parliament”. Matt Canavan insisted there must be “action taken” in relation to this behaviour, even as the carnage his Government wrought on its own people via Robodebt didn’t warrant so much as a slap on the wrist far less an investigation by the NACC. Drunken sprays while rolling on Canberra footpaths aren’t sufficiently “unbecoming” to warrant demotion from Peter Dutton’s front bench whereas Thorpe’s protest is enough for her to be drummed out of Parliament – “there’s a very strong argument for somebody who doesn’t believe in the system…to resign in principle”, Dutton posited – or, at the very least, said Simon Birmingham, to result in new penalties for Senators who engage in “disorderly conduct” outside the chamber. Birmingham has latterly decided Thorpe’s eligibility to sit in the Senate should hinge on the enunciation of a silent “h”.
Labor came next. The Prime Minister deplored Thorpe’s failure to live up to a standard of behaviour Australians “rightly expect of parliamentarians”, which, should such expectations exist, suggests a lifetime of dashed hopes for we the people. Like Dutton, Tanya Plibersek wondered why Thorpe chose to stay in a parliament she views as so flawed. Murray Watt said her grandstanding message didn’t cut through. Penny Wong intoned that Thorpe should “reflect on” what role she played in our democratic institutions. Katie Gallagher feared the important role the Senate plays in our democracy was not being adequately “respected and upheld”.
It was a veritable pile-on.
Despite the pious pearl-clutching, Thorpe has clearly reflected long and hard on whether she should take a seat in a Parliament she deems flawed despite having to swear an allegiance that “took a bit of her soul”. Have other souls felt vulnerable and unconvinced their elected roles should be contingent on swearing fealty to a privileged foreign beneficiary of an anti-democratic hereditary system? Who knows? If so, when swearing their allegiance and across this Royal Tour, they stayed schtum. Lidia Thorpe also knows full well the role she wants to play in our democratic institutions – that of a disruptor, an agitator. “I’m about truth-telling,” she says. “I’m loud, proud, black. Get used to it and listen to what I have to say.”
She claims space at the heart of our democracy to speak bald truths about her people’s treatment at the hands of the colonising power King Charles embodies – their historical experience of British invasion and genocidal atrocities, yes, and the lasting impact of dispossession, of the failure of the Crown to grapple with the injustices that were perpetrated in its name, of the lack of a treaty to reconcile the First and Second Nations of this country, and the absence of reparations for the crimes that were perpetrated and the land that was stolen but never ceded. As Justice Lionel Murphy once wrote in a High Court judgment of another Aboriginal activist, Mr Neal, Lidia Thorpe is entitled to be an agitator. If those who fight against colonial oppression are agitators, Murphy wrote, they are “in good company. Many of the great religious and political figures of history have been agitators, and human progress owes much to the efforts of these and the many who are unknown.”
You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. You are not our King.
Everything Thorpe said to King Charles was profoundly true. The Australian colonies were founded on stolen land, steeped in the blood of those who had lived here for millennia by those who forged new societies in the name of the Crown Charles now wears. Not much respect shown by the Crown during Settlement. It is in the Crown’s name too that so many First Nations’ people are enthusiastically pursued by our contemporary legal system – subjected to brutal over-policing, incarcerated in wildly disproportionate numbers, dying in custody with heartbreaking regularity.
Thorpe’s loud targeted protest was reported across the world as the global press wrote of our “complex and challenging history”. Despite Watt’s demurral, her words made a huge impact, proving much more effective when shouted in person than in the pages of the three “respectful” letters Thorpe wrote to Charles in advance of the Royal Tour – letters he ignored in which she asked for a meeting to discuss the issues she later raised in Parliament’s Great Hall, including the repatriation of Aboriginal remains still languishing in institutions across the UK.
Critics of Thorpe who argue her singular outburst did nothing to advance her cause and that Black Australia needs to behave with greater civility to bring the rest of the population along with them have short memories. The Voice campaign was all about gentle pleas and outstretched hands of friendship and White Australia rejected it comprehensively. If we didn’t want Blak activists shouting loudly in public fora, we should have voted for a quieter Voice to Parliament when we had the chance.
It may prove a salutary reminder as Charles heads to Samoa for CHOGM, a meeting of a blended family built on similarly dark foundations at which Pacific Nations are putting demands for slavery reparations on the agenda behind only saving their submerging homelands.
Regardless of whether you think Charles is a nice beekeeper who was prescient on climate change, a peevish snob with a weird thing about pens, an anti-democratic inbred who conspired with John Kerr to bring down our elected Government in 1975, or all of the above, his presence in the Great Hall and Thorpe’s brave lone protest reminded us and him of our blood-stained origins, our unreconciled present and our Constitutionally subservient future.